Displaying items by tag: cherokee national forest

Helene fallout continues; hundreds still missing; at least 60 dead in NC; flooding and wind damage still widespread in Southern Appalachians; National Guard in action; land access, supplies, communications, water and power still spotty

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Demolished vehicles are seen in the area of what used to be Red Banks Campground in the Chestoa area of Unicoi County.  Thomas Fraser/Hellbender Press

ERWIN — The death toll from Hurricane Helene climbed to at least 180 people on Wednesday, making it the deadliest hurricane to hit the United States in 50 years with the exception of Hurricane Katrina, which claimed over 1,800 lives in 2005 in what was also a largely impoverished area.

In one-hard hit community in the mountains of northeast Tennessee, emotions grew high as Spanish-speaking family of missing loved ones accused first responders through an interpreter of showboating, classism and preferential rescues during a tense press conference broadcast live on X.

The mounting death toll and increasingly fruitless searches came as millions of people spent their sixth day without running water or power and an ad hoc army of first responders, volunteers and National Guard troops struggled to deliver life-saving supplies to communities throughout the Southern Appalachians that were cut off by the record breaking flash floods spawned by the storm.

In Erwin, a town of 6,000 in Unicoi County, officials confirmed that a criminal investigation had been launched into the conduct of a manufacturing company that was accused of forcing employees to keep working even as floodwaters rose to dangerous levels.

Juvenile brook trout swim into the water of their new home during a joint effort to return the species to its rightful range in the Tellico River watershed in the southeastern Cherokee National Forest. Photo courtesy Tennessee Aquarium.

In a virtuous cycle of life, native brookies return to Tellico River watershed in southeastern Cherokee National Forest.

(The writer produced this original piece for the Tennessee Aquarium).

Navigating through a thicket of branches while clambering across slick boulders in a rushing mountain stream is a difficult task in the best of times. Doing so while attempting to balance 40-pound buckets of water filled with imperiled fish takes the challenge to an entirely new level.

A team of scientists from the Tennessee Aquarium Conservation Institute drove to one of the lush, high-elevation streams in the southern reaches of the Cherokee National Forest. During a brief lull between rainstorms, they were joined by Tennessee Wildlife Resources Agency representatives and the U.S. Forest Service to celebrate a homecoming for 250 long-lost residents of this gorgeous landscape: juvenile Southern Appalachian brook trout.

Carefully navigating through a snarl of streamside vegetation, participants paused to release five or six trout at a time into pools with overhangs where the young fish could hide from predators and ambush floating insects that washed into the stream. The going was tough, but those involved in the effort to restock almost a kilometer of this pristine creek say the challenge was worth the reward of seeing Tennessee’s only native trout back in its ancestral waters.

“The days when we release fish, especially brook trout, are really special moments,” said Tennessee Aquarium Aquatic Conservation Biologist Dr. Bernie Kuhajda. “We’re with these fish all the way from when we first bring adults into the Conservation Institute to spawn, to watching the eggs start to develop, to the juveniles that are just a few inches long and ready to release here.

“It really is knowing that we get to help restore trout to the full circle of life. Days like today are the culmination of all that work to put trout back into the Southeastern streams where they belong.”

Like many Appalachian streams, this tributary of the North River in the Tellico River watershed hasn’t hosted the brook trout for almost a century. Clearcutting of forests in the early 1900s made waters in the region too warm. Combined with the introduction of brown and rainbow trout, “brookies” were effectively lost from more than 75 percent of the waterways where they once thrived.